Local governments have some of the largest stores of publicly available data accessible through their open data portals, yet often face huge challenges when it comes to using that data to address citizen needs.

Nagorno-Karabakh is a landlocked disputed territory in the South Caucasus, internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan. As a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the region became locked in conflict, which intensified into all-out war from 1992 to 1994.

There is a nearly endless supply of open data ready for businesses and nonprofits to use. The challenge is that creating something useful with that data is not always easy. Open data comes in a variety of formats and doesn’t always make sense, especially when you’re trying to analyze data in a historical context.

Retail investments in technology reached an all-time high in 2016, a sign of the industry’s sustained commitment to providing smarter, data-driven retail experiences. But how can retailers ensure a return on these investments in 2017? It all comes back to location data.

The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, a collection of volunteers with a reputation for conducting deep analysis of eviction, gentrification, and housing rights in San Francisco has found a correlation between foreclosure rates, race, and the redlining policies of the 1930’s through a spatial analysis and visualization.

Citizen-led organizations are working in cities across the world to better understand the intricacies of housing markets, housing policy, tenant rights, as well as the socioeconomic and demographic evolution of neighborhoods. Geospatial technology and Location Intelligence have become fundamental tools for analysis, communication, storytelling, monitoring and evaluation. CARTO’s Grants For...

The number of charitable organizations around the world increases every year. There are more than 1.5 million nonprofit organizations registered in the United States alone, according to the National Center for Charitable Statistics. These organizations are committed to helping communities by providing charitable resources like sending relief aid, conducting research,...

The location intelligence industry experienced steady progress in the last twelve months, from a surge in business platform integration to advances in indoor mapping. The growth that we’ve made would not have been possible without the continuous support, and fervent momentum, of our amazing Partners. We’d like to thank our...

Deeply understanding and visually exploring the complex data of a city is key to understanding how to make timely and effective decisions. It is essential to how we improve the lives and well-being of residents. Data visualization allows for insights into the progress being made, the challenges that remain, and...

Zika, a virus that can lead to neurological complications, presents serious public health challenges to millions of people in nearly 50 countries. To confront these challenges, however, the development community has enlisted CARTO’s location intelligence services.

Indoor maps often direct users to emergency exits, which has limited our context of mapping to external geographical spaces. With the rise of Indoor Positioning Systems (IPS), however, the field of data visualization is turning inward to pioneer new paths to purchase with indoor maps.

According to an article written by esteemed musicologist Chris Brewer, we unconciously use music to develop the pyschology of our moods. That is to say, we use music to indicate love or heartbreak, to dance, to bring back memories, and to help us relax. Music is a powerful provider of...

Last week CARTO had the honor of being invited by UNICEF’s Knowledge Management & Implementation Research Unit to discuss global health issues and showcase how CARTO’s technology can help improve vaccination rates for children across the world.

The ability to derive actionable insights from the analysis of big data is a huge component to success for any telecommunications company. Big data is typically defined as having an inordinate amount of velocity, volume, and variety of data, which more often than not contains a location element. Therefore, to...

Location intelligence is a compelling method to measure technology usage in major metropolitan cities. Fon Wireless Ltd. (Fon), a leading worldwide WiFi provider that operates a system of dual access wireless networks and more than 19 million crowdsourced hotspots, fused geographic analysis and multiple data sources to discover where access...

CARTO is excited to announce a new partnership with Pitney Bowes, a global technology company powering billions of transactions – both physical and digital – across the connected and borderlessworld of commerce.

How can media outlets provide viewers and subscribers with more context on the 2016 U.S. Presidential election? CARTO knows the value of context, and you will too after watching our Election Mapping Webinar.

The power of the people starts at the hyper-local level and technology is driving new expectations on how media and campaigns view citizen participation. In today’s political climate, citizen engagement is more influential than ever and much of the interaction is taking place in the digital world. Our friend and...

CARTO continues fostering the development of smart cities with open data at the local level and global level. We are very excited to share with you another smart cities initiative from the City of San Diego - an interactive data visualization charting road repairs across the city.

On the heels of Climate Week NYC 2016, we at CARTO would like to share with you a recent project from the Mayor’s Office of Recovery and Resiliency (ORR) in support of their efforts to confront the anticipated impact of climate change on New York City over the next 100...

CARTO is proud to announce its involvement with the Partnership for Resilience and Preparedness (PREP), an international coalition empowering global resilency planning through the production of accessible platforms that can convey climate data as meaningful information to non-specialists.

Austere budget cuts have led to a reduction in original investigative journalism. CARTO’s holistic approach to location intelligence, however, enabled Le Télégramme to surmount budgetary limitations without compromising journalistic integrity, all the while spearheading a new genre of journalism.

Open data is an important part of how we understand both local and global economies, how we discover new possibilities, and how we identify the key insights within data can reveal tremendous things about the world, continuing to transform it in the years and decades to come. Our friends at...

Analyzing data on important measures like electrical indicators can seem like a daunting task, especially when that information needs to be timely and made available by law. When faced with the challenge of visualizing and analyzing over 2,000 indicators Red Eléctrica de España (REE) turned to CARTO.

Pokémon GO is Apple’s most downloaded app in a first week ever, and reached an estimated 100M Android downloads from the Google Play Store as of three days ago. In this game, where users try to “catch” different Pokémon types by walking around their local neighborhoods—or by traveling to the...

On May 27, 2016 Telefónica and Yamaha kicked off Globalrider, the world’s first ride-around-the-world fundraiser on a motorcycle where both the rider and bike remain fully connected along the 22,990-mile route of the eighty-day race. Its chief architect and solo rider is Hugo Scagnetti, a Telefónica employee whose bold promise...

CARTO’s Grants For Good Program is excited to share the great work being done by our grantee, Farmland Monitoring Project. It is our pleasure to introduce Adam Calo, PhD student at UC Berkeley specializing in agricultural policy in California, and Farmland Monitoring Project team member. In this guest post, Adam...

San Francisco has long been at the forefront of the discussion about the impact gentrification and the changing economic and demographic landscapes have on cities and the people who live there. CARTO has partnered with San Fransisco-based Anti-Eviction Mapping Project in order to analyze the data trends in rapid gentrification...

The Zika virus has been around for over 50 years but it wasn’t until this year that the World Health Organization declared it a Public Health Emergency of International Concern, as the virus continues to spread to new areas.

There is a growing concern that Montana’s waterways are at risk of new invasive aquatic species, which are known to spread rapidly through US rivers and lakes, negatively affecting water quality and altering ecosystems and natural habitats. Researchers and investigators have been dedicating more attention to this issue and they...

CartoDB and CMaps Analytics are working in the same direction to make location intelligence more accessible to more people than ever before. With a wide range of business cases and ecosystems, independant software vendors like CMaps Analytics specialize in embedding location analytics into platforms like SAP and are taking advantage...

When your organization has locations all over the country, or world, sometimes it’s hard to keep up with the progress of different targeted marketing campaigns. How you analyze all that data to determine the impact your organization is having (or not), makes all the difference in coordinating your next move....

CartoDB is constantly engaging with and supporting our community of mappers, developers, open data champions, development practitioners, students, educators, journalists, and innovative companies. We offer workshops and webinars to organizations, companies, and groups who want to learn how to harness the power of data by mastering our mapping platform.

At CartoDB we are fierce champions for open data! That is why our Grants for Good Program is supporting organizations and volunteers who advocate for more access to open data using innovative technology and crowdsourcing techniques. CartoDB work with stakeholders who are using open data and maps for research, business...

Since the launch of our new Grants for Good Program we have awarded a number of non-profit and environmental organizations with CartoDB Grants. It is with great pleasure that we introduce some of the work being done by social and environmental organizations who make use of CartoDB through the Grants...

On April 13, Kobe Bryant played his last game of his 20-year career and, in great form, scored 60 points! Fans from Los Angeles, and the world over, were saddened to see the Black Mamba go, but his shooting record will live on in history, and now as a visualization....

Every day large volumes of location data are generated by social networks, remote sensing, and mobile devices. For quite some time, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) has been used as the standard tool to manage and analyze this type of geo-referenced data. However, GIS tools have always been oriented towards professionals...

This week the Chinese service Didi Kuaidi, launched the beta of its service in the United States. Chinese passengers who use Didi Kuaidi at home can now request rides in the U.S., and the SDK powering that app is CartoDB Mobile SDK. You can read more about this all around...

We absolutely love client success stories that make use of big data and provide great insights for customers all over the world. In this case, the insights are for one of the fastest growing global fields, real estate.

Last night the Carolina Panthers were smothered by the Denver Broncos in what ended in a two-touchdown lead game. How did the U.S. react? What did they think about that last call on possession? Will we ever come to a consensus on whether Beyonce stumbled during her performance?

What’s the busiest airport in the United States? That simple question led Geographica on a path to insights and analyses of airports and flights all around the globe. Geographica specializes in software solutions to sort, analyze, and visualize data. Using CARTO, they developed a data-driven visualization to derive insights on...

Wait… My call’s dropping… I think my phone is breaking up. Darn it! I’m not getting any wifi signals so all my iMessages are turning into green SMS texts instead of the placating blue. Many telecommunications agencies work relentlessly to provide solutions to many of these and other customer related...

With less than a month away before the first U.S. presidential primaries, all eyes are on the headlines for the latest jabs by Trump, Hillary, and the gang. Just how do journalists get the spin on the topics and trends this election season?

After COP21, it is expected that more and more cities will work towards implementing a solution to climate changes that have adverse affects on infrastructure and populations. A CartoDB partner, Vizonomy, created a risk platform analysis dashboard, using open government data - for this specific reason. The dashboard allows communities...

Real estate is a great sector to leverage deep insights using location intelligence. Properati, a property search portal with a strong presence in Latin America, aims to improve the experience of purchase, sale and rental of real estate. Currently the site operates in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and Colombia with...

GKudos, a CartoDB partner, is a GIS visualizations firm that specializes in the management, analysis, and publication of geo-referenced information. One of their goals is to help customers have increased productivity and competitiveness through the use of information technology and telecommunications.

Last week’s Partner Summit was a smash hit! With representatives from more than 50 partner companies, ranging from small geo-consulting firms to large systems integrators to other SaaS businesses, this two-day event had all the right voices. Here’s a quick recap and some thoughts on the future.

When Charles O. Paullin and John K. Wright created The Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States in the 1930s, they made the best atlas they could given the tools at their disposal. Standing on the shoulders of giants, they could see further than this, and dreamed aloud...

Location data is paramount to intelligent cities planning and development. Geographical information provides a common frame of reference and big picture analysis for entrepreneurs, citizens and policymakers alike.

Planet Labs, Github, Vizzuality and CartoDB, have come together to use #LoveEarth to motivate communities on Facebook and Instagram and, to amplify the social movement around global climate change and the Paris Climate Summit - COP21, which will be convening leaders from all around the world.

Data-driven visualizations are a compelling method to engage audiences in some of the most unconventional ways. How exactly does charting the musical preferences of your global users turn into one of the most web trafficked visualizations on your platform? Spotify, an award-winning digital music service, fused geographic analysis and user...

Lewis and Clark. Armstrong and Aldrin. Williams and… Williams? If you’re going to achieve great things, it’s imperative that you pick the right partner. Someone you can trust, and who offers talent and vision.

Amidst the growing number of civically engaged public events, federally led hackathons, and public development projects, the question has arisen, where can all these projects and information sources be consolidated?

Businesses and real estate agencies can save time and money by adding spatial analytics to their intelligence systems. Location analysis can provide insights that support and improve decision making from marketing to supply chain logistics and operations. Rilos, an international business-to-business company, fused business intelligence and geographic analysis to discover...

From real estate and government organizations, to the financial sector—location intelligence is used by many industries to uncover a myriad of insights in big data. Media and Creative agencies can also harness the power of insight and uncover many secrets through a great data-driven visualization for increased brand engagement and...

Spain is the number one tourism country in the world. With sights like the Museo del Prado and Royal Palace of Madrid, it is hard not to see how such spectacular beauty could ever be overlooked. To assist in visualizing the majesty of this European gem, Vizzuality and CartoDB are...

Real estate is an industry that relies heavily on data-driven insights and visualizations. Agencies, listing services, property departments all choose CartoDB to visualize their business and make insightful decisions.

About a month ago, we announced Insight, our first ever data and design competition in conjunction with Measure, a New York City exhibit by Storefront for Art and Architecture. With the competition close at the end of last month, we wanted to thank all of the teams who submitted projects...

The ‘smarter city’ is all the rage, and while a buzzing megapolis may have the complexity and resources to deploy a mayoral ‘geek squad’ or install flocks of sensors, the average town has to fulfill its duties on a much tighter budget. We’re all about tools that bring location intelligence...

CartoDB prides itself on helping empower organizations and people to achieve great things and make the world a better place. Our ever-growing climate and non-profit grants have provided innovative organizations with tools and infrastructure to have meaningful impact from the neighborhood all the way up to the world.

Last week CartoDB had the pleasure of speaking with entrepreneur and real estate map guru Dan (Vadim) Marusin. He is the founder of EstateBlock, a Vancouver Canada based real estate search engine startup powered by CartoDB! Dan discovered CartoDB out of a need to provide easily accessible, high quality, data-secure...

Explore all the varying possibilities of London business infrastructure with GROW.LONDON, a geographic visualization tool developed to help businesses and investors identify key areas to invest in, grow, and expand in the London metropolitan area. Using the power of CARTO, GROW.LONDON is mapping toward a global urban future where knowledge...

This past Sunday was election time again in Spain. Every four years people head to the polls for a regional and municipal election that often foreshadows what is to come in the national election held later in the year. Nowadays these events are considered much more than mere voting—they’re true...

Many things herald the long-awaited arrival of spring - sunnier weather, leafier trees - but no springtime event is more exciting to baseball fans than Opening Day! On an appointed day in April, all 30 Major League Baseball teams open the new season enthusiastically with 15 back-to-back ball games. While...

Global Forest Watch and Vizzuality have come together to make visualizing ecological data in maps that much more useful and effective. CartoDB is excited to take part in GFW’s mission in forest preservation.

Today we hear from a friend from our NYC community, Chris Henrick. Chris is a MFA Design & Technology graduate student at Parsons, The New School For Design. He is a long time user and an expert on CartoDB. We recently saw The Northwest Bushwick Community Map, a project he...

Building a startup is both difficult and rewarding work. It requires a team of dedicated and passionate people, with the tools and skills to face challenges head on, and re-imagine the possibilities of successful innovation. Being a product of these experiences, our team at CartoDB was proud to partner with The Startup Institute New York to elevate and educate new communities of innovators!

Like many of you know, building a startup is hard work. The CartoDB team is a product of this energy. Growing from a group of programmer friends with a desire to build technology for better communication–and to ultimately change the world–has taught us about what it takes to be successful innovators. Step one, obviously, is to believe in your mission. Step two is to make others believe.

In Southern Spain there is a city that was once the capital of Hispania Baetica during the Roman Empire. At present it is well known because of its incredible cultural and monumental patrimony: Cordoba, in the community of Andalusia. Thanks to its historic legacy, the old town of Cordoba was...

Every single day we see a huge influx of beautiful maps created using CartoDB. The topics range from everything from the best places to live in the UK to seismic activity in the depths of Iceland. We decided to compile a list of some really cool maps done by huge...

We welcome Dani Latorre in this guest post to let him tell us about a little project in which he has used CartoDB as part of the development. Stay tuned for more stories like this, and if you want, just write and tell us your stories@cartodb.com

It didn’t take long after the Superbowl ended for there to be an awesome visualization of all the Twitter activity during the game. The visualization uses CartoDB’s Torque library to show over 1 million tweets in just 6 hours.

A new series of maps have been published on the Internet Archive’s blog showing the location and frequency that US television news has mentioned places around the world. You can see the original blog post here, Mapping 400,000 Hours of U.S. TV News.

The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) has been working hard to mobilize a large number of volunteers to digitize areas of the Philippines in order to help aid efforts. We put together this map to show the results of that great effort.

Last week was the international FOSS4G meeting, one of our favorite conferences of the year. We told you a few weeks ago about some of the things we would be presenting at the meeting. Something we forgot to mention was that this year they did something completely new called, “Opening Up The Map”. In short, it was a community generated gallery of some of the best maps coming from the open source community.

Earlier this week we saw this amazing blog post from LifeWatch, where they map and analyze the life of a seagull. The blog post comes out of a project that tracks, in real-time, 30 birds using solar powered GPS units. From those 30 birds, the authors single-out Eric,

Last weekend there were elections in Germany, and that means a lot of mapping! Maps are a fundamental tool to explain voting results, differences between regions, possible coalitions, and more. And during election night they become one of the most fundamental visualization techniques for showing the status of results.

In this guest blog, Tim Robertson describes how the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) are building a dynamic density map with 0.5 billion tiles and supporting 40,000 tile updates per second using components of the CartoDB stack for their forthcoming portal. This is the first time the CartoDB stack is connected to an HBase / Hadoop backend to handle large data volumes and velocities. It is a great example on the upcoming configurations we will see of CartoDB connected to Big Data sources.

Today we are pleased to publish a post from Greg More, founder of OOM Creative. We saw some of the maps being created by Greg and his team for the City of Melbourne and knew our users would be interested in the project and process. Enjoy!

In our second post this week about Twitter visualizations, we want to show you a cool visualization of tweets from throughout the NBA Finals visualized using CartoDB. Like the Wimbledon map we showed you yesterday, this map makes use of a neat set of ~70,000 geospatially tagged tweets. The tweets are visualized in two distinct ways. In the first map, all tweets are displayed by location and with a color according to the team the tweet identifies with,

Today we hear from Steven Romalewski in a guest post detailing work on the “Who Represents Me: NYC” project. Steven has created several projects using CartoDB, generally focused on topics in the NYC area. We think his work is interesting to people anywhere though! We’re happy to let him share his work with you here.

From its beginning, CartoDB been a powerful tool for journalists because it’s easy, flexible, scalable and open source. With this simple-to-use tool journalists everywhere are discovering the immense power data visualization gives them for research and telling stories.

Even though our blog gives a lot of attention to maps, CartoDB is a great tool for a lot more than just maps. We have seen in the past how the CartoDB APIs can do all sorts of dynamic queries to CartoDB hosted data. While dynamic queries CartoDB can be geospatial in nature, even returning GeoJSON formatted results, we haven’t spent much time highlighting the fact that they don’t have to be geospatial. That is why we are excited by the latest project released by the Climate Policy Initiative, the Policy Climate Interactive.

As some of you may already know, Newsweek / The Daily Beast has been using CartoDB for some time now, and as such today’s blog post comes from Michael Keller of Newsbeast labs. We’d also like to take the opportunity thank Michael for his amazing contributions to the CartoDB community. Thanks!

Over the past months you have probably come to realize, we love data that moves. Moving data can make your maps and visualizations really come to life and data you can use to build these visualizations can come in a lot of forms. Whether it’s data that crawls and zips across a map through time, data that bursts and comes to life as you watch, or data that changes form or intensity, it all can lead not to some really amazing visualizations.

We recently announced a “Show up your maps” initiative to see and share with the community the types of things CartoDB users were building. Thus far we’ve had some pretty cool responses and while we’d love to show you all of them, we’ve for the time being selected three projects.

The horrific shooting occurred on July 20 in Colorado has reignited the debate in US over gun control. How bad is the problem?, asks The Daily Beast in a new piece of data journalism based on a list of 431 shootings in US with more than one victim since 2005.

Online activists are having a key role documenting the ongoing civil war in Syria. As this terrible war unfolds, they are posting dozens of videos and live streams on the internet, and curating data to fight the so-called “electronic war”.

This week, The Wall Street Journal rolled out its Political Moneyball graphic, a visualization of the connections between political action committees, super PACS, campaigns and individuals. Based on the latest official Federal Election Commission data for the 2012 election, the project visualizes more than one million connections between donors and committees. The data is updated every month.

This year marks the twentieth anniversary of Restaurant Week in New York City, and in order to commemorate its longevity, the dining celebration has been extended to a very un-weekly 20+ days, creating a somewhat good problem for New Yorkers to have.

Doctors of the World is a healthcare and humanitarian aid charity working worldwide to provide solutions that improve health and save lives. Its Spanish branch is launching this week the campaign “The health virus”, an initiative to raise awareness of the global right to health focused on the maternal health challenge —every two minutes, a woman dies from complications related to pregnancy.

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) published today its first interactive map on the 2012 election. The map is part of an ongoing, regularly updated full election coverage. All data analysis and storage is done with CartoDB. The final election map is built through CartoDB API’s and the Leaflet map library.

In 1943, four NYC newspapers published a local market analysis aimed at advertisers. The document was based on the 1940 Census and included hundreds of photos & color-coded maps portraying the geographic patterns of monthly rent levels across the city. It also featured statistics and short narratives about the neighborhoods.

If you live in NYC, you’ve probably heard about a new bike-share program that will come to life this summer. The program will be launched with around 420 stations and is scheduled to grow to some 10,000 bikes and 600 rental stations throughout the city by summer 2013.

In United States there is quite a discussion about redrawing legislative district lines. The Center for Urban Research in New York together with The New York World have developed some comparison maps. They have used CartoDB to develop those maps and we would like to share the link to the application as we think is really interesting comparison technique. Steven Romalewski has written a blog post about it.

In The last 2 weeks a lot of new applications have been developed at #ecohacknyc, #nycbigapps and #sciencehackday using CartoDB, pretty excited. This demonstrates the power of CartoDB specially for fast development of location aware applications and mapping. We are gonna be highlighting different applications that make use of CartoDB on the next days.